Entries from March 2007 ↓

So I mentioned some time ago that we have been working with the wild gang behind Songbird
to enable GStreamer on Windows and Mac. I already posted a shot of GStreamer running on Windows some time ago and today the time has come to show of a shot of GStreamer in action on the Mac.

One of the cool things we discovered was that we are able to provide smoother video seeking on the Mac than you get with the quicktime player.

Be aware that even if the application in the picture is a X11 application the video window is MacOSX native and the same with the sound output. A big thanks to Edward who has been fighthing with the ‘charms’ of MacOSX like crazy to make this happen :)

The call for applications to host GUADEC 2008 went out yesterday. One question that came up right away was if people outside Europe could apply to host GUADEC. I am not on the commitee deciding this, but from previous years discussions its not set in stone that it do happen within Europe. The requirements is more that it would be reasonably cheap for people living in Europe and north America to get there. This means that in my opinion a good application from for instance near-europe would have a good chance of getting the go ahead. I suggested in an earlier blog that a Moroccon Linux user group apply to host it in either Casablanca or Marrakesh. With companies like Easy Jet now flying there this is absolutly within the realm of feasible in terms of cost of travel for participants. And of course many near-europe countries come with the advantage that they offer cheap food and lodging once you get there.

That said I also think it would be great to see some east European applications this year. So far Guadec has moved up and down a rather strict north/south axis even within the borders of Europe.

So if you are part of a group of linux user group in east or near Europe this is the time to get moving on organizing an application to host the coolest conference in the free software world!

The new deadline for Google Summer of Code proposals is 26th of March. So I strongly recommend any interested students to get moving on sending in their GStreamer related SoC proposals to the Freevo project. You find their project suggestions list here.

Dirk Meyer of the Freevo mediacenter project gst-devel today pointing to
the Freevo summer of code projects page. As you can see they have a lot of GStreamer related things as they are moving a lot of their infrastructure over to GStreamer these days. So I strongly encourage interested students to sign up for Freevo projects.

Aaron Bockover pointed on his blog to some interesting Banshee projects which also involve GStreamer, like making a GStreamer using Windows port of Banshee work perfectly. You find these projects here.

Also a general note to mentoring organisations who have students submit interesting GStreamer related proposals, please be aware that there are many people in the GStreamer community willing to mentor/co-mentor such projects. So if you need mentors with strong GStreamer knowledge for your projects please let us know.

Having discussed how to evolve GNOME on LUGRadio I figured that
an interesting proposal for a Google Summer of Code project would be to fork GTK+. Many people in the community have talked about how GNOME 3 would need to happen outside the current structures. I also think that nothing fundamental will change in GNOME without a new GTK+ giving the impetous for such a change. So a enterprising student could put together a proposal for taking GTK+ and trying to make a ‘Beryl’ version. The goal might not need to be to create something that would actually become GTK+, but instead come up with changes to GTK+ that enables some stunning graphical effects inside GTK+ applications, kind what they are doing with Beryl on the window manager level. So the ‘fork’ would not care about things maintainability, portability or sensibiilty, but instead try to enable some select demo applications to do some amazing looking things. Enlightenment (which also sports a GUI toolkit these days) would be a good example for ideas for some cool effects, Beryl another. Another idea could be to try to integrate librsvg with GTK+ and use it to do interesting things. The goal of such projects should simply be to try to inspire the GNOME community into taking the leap.

When GNOME originally came out its themeing capabilities essentially set the bar for letting users and developers change the look and feel of their desktop. Lets try to do so again :)

And to make it clear. With Fork I don’t mean an actuall fork in the sense of a new project meant for a life of its own, more of doing a wild and wacky experiemental branch.

Ok, so it seems GStreamer didn’t make it into GSoC this year. I haven’t gotten any official explanation and I don’t think I will ever get one either. What it do seem like is that most projects which participated last year got close to automatic re-approval unless they fucked up last year. This is course meant the number of slots open for new organisations was very small and looking at the new entries compared to last year it seems they focused on getting organisations doing something that felt a little different from the already participating organisations. So while I part of my feel almost insulted on behalf of GStreamer looking at some of the projects accepted, I think it is important to remember that they are there because they where there last year and did a decent job of mentoring their students, not because Google did any kind of importantance/relevance evalulation of the participating projects.

For for students looking into doing GStreamer related projects my suggestion is the same as we proposed last year and which worked out well for many students. Submit your proposal to another project which is relevant for your proposal, the most easy targets being GNOME and KDE for application projects using GTK+ and Qt. But also other projects are of course possible candidates.

So in case anyone missed it I participated in the most recent edition of LUGRadio mostly talking about various multimedia related things. Had a fun time hanging out with Ade, Matt, Jono and Stuart in the English heartland for one evening. Listening to oneself recorded like that is quite scary, one realize how mangled some sentences come out and how badly some words get pronounced :)

Schrodinger 0.5.0

So I cut a new release of Schrodinger today, our Dirac implementation. David Schleef has been kicking ass lately and this release feature much much improved image quality over the previous development snapshot.

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We are still not 100% there yet, but things are moving forward at a good pace. You can get the latest package at the Schrodinger website.

So in order to not miss out like last year we have managed to get our
application for participating in Google Summer of Code submitted in time this year. So if everything goes as we hope GStreamer will be a separate GSoC project this year. We invite any application developer using GStreamer to add projects proposals to our SoC2007 wiki in addition to any GStreamer ‘internal’ proposals you might have.

UK trip

So I spent most of this week in England doing various meetings. Spent Monday and Tuesday at Brunel University participating in a project meeting for a EU project we are involved inn. While the University buildings didn’t look terribly exciting I have to say that my impression when walking around campus was that they have managed to create a very interesting multi ethnic environment at Brunel with a very wide specter of cultures and backrounds and without any specific one to be the clear majority.

On Tuesday evening I headed down to London and crashed at Matthew and Soz place. Its always a blast to hang out with Matthew exchanging the latest news and discussing items of shared interest. Still think his dogs looks freaky though, but it also has to be said that I don’t think I ever met more friendly and good natured dogs either.

Wednesday morning I went travelled into downtown London to have a meeting with Dolby. My contact at Dolby was a nice fellow named Andy Dowell who funnily enough was going to Barcelona later the same day.
Might be heading over to Dolby HQ in the US later this year to discuss further how we can work together as it turned out we and Dolby might have further common interests than I first thought.

After the Dolby meeting I took the train up to the English heartlands, that tranquil place where people live a happy and content life following in the footsteps of their forefathers. This place, also known as Wolverhampton, is also the location of four large gents who wants to turn this rural paradise into the information technology pulpit of England. We did a recording of LUGRAdio in the evening where apart from serious topics related to Linux and open source we managed to discuss embarassing sexual desires and orange underwear.